A Photography Daybook

Main menu

Post navigation

A Beginning?

How do you come up with ideas for new photography projects? A conscious decision? An organic development of an existing project? Or perhaps looking back through your archives and finding common themes.

Over the recent break I recently found the house in the photo above. While I was taking the photo a town worker gave me a brief history of the property. Clearly it’s abandoned and in a state of disrepair.

I see these abandoned properties everywhere, and while I’d wondered about who lived there, why did they leave and why is it now left to rot, I had never photographed them. Given my sensitivity to these abandoned properties it seems as though I should photograph them, at least until they’re out of my system.

What do you notice all the time? Perhaps that would make a good project?

I’ve always had a hunch for such homes and houses (and this is one of the reasons for me to go to Failaka island here). I’ve done even a panorama inside an abandoned bank building – quite a ghost-provoker.
Ideas about photography. How ironic that I, in the current time, am reading a book (in Arabic) about the philosophy of arts in general, and it discusses the various philosophies from the old times (Plato and Aristotle) up to the medieval (Plotinus and religious arts) up till the end with modern philosophers like Kant and Croce. Inspirations (or as sometimes called the “genius”) in creating the work of art, according to Croce at least, is a work of the unconscious; meaning, a person do not think how to get inspired, nor how to do inspiration. But it is something in the soul and the medium of the art is a medium for this soul to shape the world in order to express a certain feeling.